John L. Robinson on media, journalism and citizenship

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One of the values of Twitter

People often tell me that they “don’t get Twitter.” I’ve gotten to the point where I tell them that they just have to make a concerted effort to wander around and get the feel for it. But the New York Times reminds me of one of the cooler things about Twitter: the ability to talk with some of my favorite authors.

Salman Rushdie told me he enjoys Twitter because “it allows one to be playful, to get a sense of what is on a lot of people’s minds at any given moment.”

Agree completely with you here. After I finished Aaron Shapiro’s “Users Not Customers,” I DMed him and he and I exchanged a few tweets. Same with Robert Levine and his “Free Ride, how digital parasites are destroying the culture business, and how the culture business can fight back .” I talked with him on Twitter while I was reading the book about material in chapters I was reading at the time. You get all kinds of insights from the authors about what they discovered and yet isn’t in the book. Good behind-the-scenes stuff. I was actually disappointed to find Michael Lewis not on Twitter after reading Boomerang.